Cascading
by KathainBowen
Summary: He is the only one left, now. Just him and his differential. House struggles to survive and solve the case when the hospital is overrun by the infected, and they are closing in on him! Serious zombie-fic based loosely on THE ZOMBIE SURVIVAL GUIDE.


**CASCADING**

He stares at the whiteboard intently, hunched over and clutching the cool, aluminum frame with one hand to steady himself. Things have been happening too swiftly about him, like being caught up in a whirlwind. The information is scant at best, scrawled in jagged, hasty letters in white marker. There is barely anything to go on.

_Hour 1 : Pain/Discolor Wound_

They started coming into PPTH in the wee hours of yesterday morning, sometime around 2 or 3. The witching hours, his mother used to call them when he was little. They shambled into the emergency room, mostly overpaid yuppies leaving the bar. All issued the same complaint of being attacked on the street by hobos. He snorts. As if. Hobos have better things to do with their time than attack and bite rich-bitch kids from Princeton, like drinking malt liquor and fist fighting for ham sandwiches. And, yet, each of that initial wave came in about the same time, each with a circular mark of human teeth or long lines of scratch marks upon their flesh, colored a putrid brown-purple. He wishes he has a photo to continue his comparison, but he has already scoured and viciously discarded every book in his office in vain for anything similar save necrotic tissue.

_"Chase had been down there,"_ he muses solemnly, _"Which can mean _only _one thing."_

He tries not to think about it. It's better, really, if he doesn't think about it. Of course, he can't help it. Just his luck, Chase still put in a few extra shifts on call in the ER to pick up some cash here and there. He knows Chase had been there, because Chase had called him directly when things started getting.... weird. A part of him distantly curses the fact the kid so effectively distanced himself from his well-to-do father. If he hadn't, well, Chase wouldn't have been down in the ER.

_Hour 5 : 99-103 F. Chills, dementia, vomiting, joint pain._

He rubs his forehead. It is dark in the office with the lights out, almost welcoming so. The black ink of the marker contrasts so sharply against filtered moonlight pouring in from the balcony. It is the sort of comforting dark that he once appreciated, but, now, it sends chills down his spine.

He focuses, instead, on the facts. Fever. Chills. Altered mental status - although generally mild and seemingly fever induced. Nausea and vomiting. Acute joint point. At this point, it looks like nothing more than the common flu, only working on an exceedingly accelerated time table. He remembers being sick through various times in his life with the same complaints. The icy play of shivers down his body, the flaring of white hot pain in his knees, elbows, ankles, wrists, spine, well... everything. The general fugue of illness and perhaps the vaguest of symptoms.

Chase had not called him when the initial crop of patients showed these signs. Instead, Chase did the same thing he knows he would have done. Chase sent them home with strict orders of bed rest and increased fluid intake. It makes sense. Why keep an ER waiting room packed with people with a contagious viral infection to just kick the bug back and forth between one another and infect hospital staff and other patients? He knows he would have _also _sent them home with the additional advise of not bothering him with something as diagnostically pointless as the flu.

He glances to his side, through the once decorative, now protective partition of glass between himself and the still body on the other side. No. He turns away, putting his eyes back on the whiteboard. He promised himself not to think about it.

_Hour 8 : Fever up (103-106 F), increased dementia, numbness about wound/ extremities, impaired muscle coord. _

This, he recognizes, is when Chase called him. When the mystery illness stopped being the common flu and started presenting as.... well.... as something else. The increased fever and dementia would indicate a severe viral infection, a tough strain of the flu upon a weakened immune system. He knows this. Chase knew this. Chase had even balked when he yelled at the Aussie for calling him over something like this.... until Chase told him about the slowly failing muscle coordination and the spreading numbness in the patients' arms and legs, radiating inwards from the hands and feet. That alone had caught his attention, while the pluralization of the word "patient" to "patients," indicating multiple people affected by this supposed contagion had solidified his interest.

He'd driven to the hospital immediately, skirting the ever building traffic all leading towards the emergency center on his bike. He had never been so thankful to drive a motorcycle in his life than when he darted between the stopped cars and chocked bottlenecks of the sick and infected. Granted, he had almost been killed several times by jackass drivers with no concept that of checking their blind spots, but, were it not for the bike, he might have spent hours trapped in the god-awful traffic just like Wilson and Foreman.

Foreman never made it to the hospital. He doesn't know what happened to Foreman. Maybe he got sidetracked. Maybe Foreman was diverted by the police or stopped to save a busload of children from some terrible fate. He doesn't know, and, more importantly, considering what happened to Wilson, he doesn't _want _to know.

_"Wilson...."_

He shudders. Best not to think about them either. He'll just get maudlin and pissy about the stark lack of a good alcohol to thoroughly drown himself in. He returns his attention to the white board.

_Hour 11 : Paralysis - lower half, overall numbness, decreased heartrate/bp_

He had been present for this, standing over his patients as they slowly started to loose the ability to move their lower half. A few of the more daring souls in their depressive denial had actually attempted to force recalcitrant muscles and legs into action, gripping themselves with their hands and throwing their loose limbs off the gurney in failed attempts to prove him wrong. He had to give them credit for the varied attempts at willing their bodies to function properly once more, considering he had made his own false starts after the infarction.

He had appreciated the paralysis when it struck. It was a new symptom. He _likes _new symptoms. It should have narrowed his field of search for the cause of the mystery illness while Cuddy continued to squawk and complain about him as the CDC and the military began to move in on _her _hospital, on her _baby_. In retrospect, he knows he should have been far more concerned when the monstrous trucks and humvees in their dark greens encircled the hospital, spilling out their well armed soldiers clad in camouflage fatigues and thick breathing masks. Instead, he had been too thoroughly distracted by the rapid onset of complete lower body paralysis occurring in so many patients.

He remembers Wilson arguing with the grunts at the door, begging for his little cancer kiddies to be escorted for the hospital, only to be turned away at rifle point. Quarantine _is _quarantine, after all. No excuses and no exceptions for the kiddies, no matter how young, adorably pathetic, and heartbreakingly terminal they are. Wilson had been downright shouting in the ambulance bay, demanding his sickies be transferred somewhere else. The oncologist'd almost been shot for refusing to back down. Wilson had been outside, begging, pleading to be let into the hospital. Wilson had made it there _after _quarantine had been established. The soldiers had simply refused to allow him to pass, no matter his credentials or identification, and, when he refused to let it go, that bleeding heart of his, they did the simplest thing. They had cracked him on the skull with the butt of a rifle and hauled him off to the brig, or wherever to be trapped in the "hot zone" as the infection tightened its hold on Princeton.

He has seen Wilson since then, wandering about like the little lost lamb he has always imagined in his friend, a confused and vacant look to his eyes, but he knows that mobile body isn't Wilson anymore. It is nothing more than a plague ridden corpse, hardwired by chemical constraint to the will of something so miniscule, it escapes visible detection even under high powered microscopes. It is the insidious nature of the beast that is any viral contagion. It is why, he knows, it took them so long to recognize the sickness as truly a virus of any form, at the very least narrowing the ultimately futile search he continues carrying on with, even now.

He spits a curse under his breath. He reaffirms his resolve to _not _think about Wilson, or Chase, or Foreman, or any of the others. It hurts, and he doesn't like things that hurt. He has spent much of his adult life avoiding pain of both physical mental in either the childish diversions of his video games and soaps or his chemical distraction of the warm embrace of his Vicodin.

_Hour 20 : Cardiac arrest._

He sighs at the note. Death. 100% of the patients died at around the hour twenty mark. Some sooner, some slightly thereafter, but all died. Every single man, woman, and child. They all died.

In the back of his mind, he can still see the look on Chase's face when the grim realization set in. Chase had taken him into his office, locked the door, and closed the blinds behind him. He'd made an overly dramatic point of ignoring the Aussie while he downed a couple more pills, just enough to take the edge off the pain in his leg and keep him moving for another few hours. He'd teased and berated Chase, badgering him until the younger man had finally snapped and drawn up his sleeve to reveal the discolored semi-circle of puncture marks on his arm, displaying the macabre purple-brown coloration that heralded his own infection.

"House.... I've...."

He had shushed Chase with a simple shake of his head. Chase didn't have to say a thing. He did not want to hear it.

And, yet, Chase had kept trying, kept stammering inanely, "I didn't think.... I... I was.... I don't know. Got too close." Chase had rubbed at the arm, avoiding the ugly wound, shaking his head solemnly as he did. "It didn't seem bad...."

He had shaken his head once more. Nothing Chase could have said would make any difference. He'd been bitten. All the initial victims had been bitten. All had contracted the infection from a bite, meaning Chase had whatever virus or bacteria this was drifting about in his bloodstream, starting the inevitable cycle within him. He'd been almost supernaturally calm as Chase had quietly broken down in his office.

He had asked with a hesitance, "How long?"

And Chase had simply sighed and shrugged. "About four hours. Maybe more."

He had summarily taken Chase's temperature and found it slightly elevated. It could have been just the stress, the running between labs and patients that had raised Chase's temperature, but he had known better. The illness had already started down its fatal course in Chase. He settled Chase on the Eames chair that had seen him through so many flare-ups of his legs and packed the Aussie with bags of ice in a paltry attempt at stemming the ever climbing fever and slowing the progression. He had less than sixteen hours to find a cure for Chase.

He blinks at the memory, his vision suddenly blurry. He scrubs at his eyes with the back of his hand. No. It is not tears that blur his vision, he rationalizes, for he is the great Dr. Gregory House. He does not weep or show the same petty, conflicting emotions that cloud others' judgments and get in the way of the important things.

_Hour 23+ : ?_

He flinches, gripping the marker sharply in his hand. He is not certain what to write here. At the twenty third hour mark, something seemingly miraculous had happened. There had been spontaneous motion in the deceased. At first, it had been thought to be muscle spasms, the last firings of nerve endings, nothing more interesting and out of the ordinary than the common death twitch and the eventual voiding of the bowels and bladder. However, there had been more. He has no idea how to describe it.

A low moan catches his attention, sending an icy shiver down his spine. He tries not to think about it. He stills his heart and forces himself to remember the thick panes of glass between him and the world. These panes of glass and drawn blinds once shielded him from responsibility, protected him from Cuddy and the watchful eyes of the pissed off relatives of his patients. It had been his impenetrable fortress of solitude. Now, however, the glass seems so very fragile, so delicate and easily broken. It worries him, sends his nerves firing and flaring until raw, his heart racing until it flaps unsteadily in his chest with great, aching heaves.

He turns his attention back to his differential.

_Hour 23+ : ?_

He contemplates for a moment as the moaning groans louder, grows closerbefore beginning to write, the marker twitching and shaking in his usually steady hand.

_Hour 23+ : ? Spont. movement, consc. return._

Something sounds upon the window, like a hand pawing at the glass. He jerks in fright, his respiration going from calm and collected to ragged and racing in a heartbeat. Someone.... no....._something _is just beyond the glass, lurking just behind the blinds. They are looking for him; he knows it with a cold horror. If he focuses, he can see them, nothing more than a blotchy shape behind the blinds, the dark silhouette of a stranger stumbling along the wall with a hand upon the glass to steady their choppy, uneven strides. They know he is there. He gulps, swallowing the lump in his throat, holding his breath, and willing himself to absolute silence and stillness until the figure passes and the halls go silent once more. He almost blacks out from the lack of oxygen by the time the figure is gone, a dazzling array of colors and starbursts flaring to life in his vision before the fresh oxygen of a sudden gasp snuff the life out of those stars and bring the blood rushing back to his head.

_Hour 23+ : ? Spont. movement, consc. return._

He frowns and surveys the notations beside the hour mark. They make no logical sense and are barely legible. He scrubs the board with the side of his hand, smearing the black ink away with a rough gesture.

_Hour 23+ : ?_

At the twenty-third hour, he is not certain what happened. His thoroughly dead patients had simply gotten up. Several of the doctors had considered it a miracle. It is lucky he had not. He had known, somewhere instinctively within, that there was _nothing _right about this at all, and, so, he had holed up with the rapidly worsening Chase in his office. It is fortunate they had been there, safely encased in their glass tomb when those poor, sickly souls turned on their caregivers, snapping and biting, hungering for human flesh.

_Hour 23+ : ? Psych. behavior. Aggression. Viol. tend. Canbl._

Another moan catches his attention, followed quite promptly by the smack of an mostly melted bag of ice falling to the floor. He jumps, but remembers the body in the other room. Chase had expired while they were locked up, and he had been forced to drag the body into the conference room to lock it away from him should Chase.... reanimate.

God, he hates that word. "Reanimate." It sounds like something from a bad sci-fi flick, something from the 1950s that he and Wilson had once delighted in berating over a few liberal rounds. And, yet, to his annoyance, it is the only word he can use to describe what happened to his once patients.

He had slowly, painfully hauled Chase into the next room and repacked the ice about him in the half-hearted thought that it might prevent the virus from bringing the once bright and friendly Aussie back from the dead in the same, twisted, adulterated and inhumane format as all the rest of the contagion's victims.

_Hour 23+ : ? Psych. behavior. Aggression. Viol. tend. Canbl._

_Reanimation occurs._

The fine wires and connections to his soul fray and snap, and he hurls the whiteboard off its stand in a rage. The object falls to the floor with a clatter, but it is not as satisfying as he imagined it would be. The whiteboard lands face side up, the timeline written in his own hand screaming and taunting at his ineptitude, at his appalling and fatal failure as a doctor. He wants to scream, wants to rage and fume at the top of his lungs, but nothing comes up. He is too worn, too raw for any of that now, no matter how he craves the emotional release and the perfect, pristine calm that follows.

There comes the slap of an open, uncoordinated palm upon glass. He glances over his shoulder to the man on the other side of the glass between his office and the conference room and smiles. It is a faint little curve of his lips brought on by the absolute terror of being faced by something so ghastly without even the niceties of the blinds drawn.

"Hello, Chase," he greets slowly and awkwardly, feeling hesitant and suddenly terrified at the close proximity of one of the once dead.

Chase stares back at him with empty, hungry eyes, his mouth open and teeth bared. Chase hungers for his flesh. He knows it. He has seen what happens when the dead come back. He watches cautiously, studying the movements. His eyes flicker across the muscles and the torso, searching for any of the subtle indications of respiration or a beating heart and finding..... nothing. He sees only a ghoul before him, slavering over the glass and crawling, pressing himself into the plate as though he could just force his way in after his prey. There is nothing left to Robert Chase anymore, just a corpse, just like Wilson in the streets below.

He draws a deep breath. "Well, I'd love to chat, but work to do. You know how it is." He nervously jokes with the predator lurking in his duckling's skin, mostly to reassure himself. "Busy, busy, busy."

Chase draws in a breath and lets it out in a low, threatening hiss. He takes a step back, bumping into the desk. Chase bares his teeth once more. Chase has always had perfect, lovely teeth. Pearly white incisors in the front, and all the rest flanking in perfectly even lines. He has always known that Chase wore braces as a child just by glancing at the impossible perfection to the Aussie's smile. He has kept that knowledge secret with the intent of using it against Chase at a later date to rib and antagonize the man about how he must have been picked on at school for his metal mouth. Now, however, there is _nothing _funny about those perfect teeth.

Chase rears back with his hand and slams it harshly into the glass. The glass quakes, then quivers in the frame, but holds. He sags and lets out a sigh of profound relief. Chase cannot get him in his office. Chase, however, does not seem to understand and continues the strike at the windows between him and his prey, growing increasingly agitated when his blows fail to yield the desired result.

He shakes his head. "Give it up, Chase. You're not getting in."

Chase lets out a bone-chilling, blood curdling howl that rattles through his bones and the office about him before continuing with his aggressive assault of the window panes. He worries. Chase is alive, he thinks, in there somewhere, and he knows he can fix this, cure this. At least, he hopes he can. And, if Chase is in there, and, if there is a cure, boy is the whelp going to be pissed if he breaks his delicate, artistic little surgeon's hands.

"Chase.... stop," he breathes. "You're just going to hurt yourself."

Chase stills for a moment, and he thinks, perhaps, he has gotten through to the younger man. Chase's mouth hangs open, a thin strand of saliva dripping from it and glistening in the moonlight where the spittle pools on his pristine, ivory lab coat. He trembles when Chase fails to move again, certain he has reached some portion of the Aussie's mind locked behind the aggression spurned by the fever and the virus raging within him. Then, Chase tilts his head back and lifts his lips to the night, letting out an inhumane sound that he cannot describe.

"Chase..."

He goes to say something else, anything else, but another slap upon the windows jolts him. Chase has not moved. He glances to his side. There is another shadow beyond the blinds. He shivers. Chase had not stopped. No, for as Chase hurls his shoulder into the glass while more silhouettes appear behind the blinds to bang away at the glass, he understands. Chase has just rung the dinner bell, and _he _is the main course.

He stumbles backward, tripping against his desk and falling to the soft, plush carpet beneath. How often had he sprawled on the carpet, riding out the soaring, warm embrace of morphine or Vicodin before it brought him low enough to the earth to focus once more? How often had he hid from Cuddy by ducking down on the carpet behind his desk? He cannot count the times, but he suddenly cannot get those inane thoughts out of his head as he scrambles, struggling to get his limbs working and moving in the same direction as the glass splinters under the force of many hands with an unearthly cheery, tinkling sound. He jerks and lets out a yelp of surprise when the glass buckles with more and more of that sound, dragging his uncoordinated body further and further into the corner.

On the other side of the glass, Chase sneers, curling his lips in a horrid delight.

He picks himself up and throws his body through the glass door and onto the balcony just in the nick of time. Behind him, the glass shatters on the wall and a dozen nameless faces charge through the blinds and into the office, but he is gone. He breathes heavily, panting and swallowing great mouthfuls of the night air as he hopes they do not notice him on the balcony. The door locks from inside upon closing, but it can still be opened from within. They can still come for him.

Below, a lonely moan pierces the night, traveling upwards to greet him with an eerie, hollow sound as the others continue to ransack the office in search of live food. He hugs his arms close to his chest, cringing at each and every jarring crash just beyond the glass. His heart hammers in his ears, the blood rushing to his face and ears with a tremendous roar, humming through his nerves and veins and cascading over him like a tidal wave.

It's _just _the epinephine. He knows this. He weighs the affects of the hormone on the human body and the coinciding amounts pumping through his own heart. It sings out from his core and down to each extremity where it tingles and vibrates oddly through his sympathetic nervous system. He knows it is a natural response of his body to dump a massive dose of epinephrine into his bloodstream, his nervous system reacting to the pure, unadulterated terror, elevating his blood sugar, boosting the supply of oxygen and glucose to his brain, increasing his heart rate and stroke volume, while simultaneously suppressing functions that are not currently essential - like digestion. It is his body's own way of 'revving the engine' so to speak.

Something slams close by, followed by an off settling smearing sound of wet on smooth. He trembles, giving a glance to the door and the bloody hand print that now mars the glass. They will find him. Soon now.

His heart thunders now in his ears, threatening to burst blood vessels all through his skull; he has never been this afraid in his life.... not since he was a child. He remembers once, hiding in his closet, pressed against the wall just like this, hoping and praying to a God he no longer puts any faith in to spare him as the bulky shadow of his father passed. He holds his breath, just like he had back then, in the dark closet.

He screws his eyes shut tight and whimpers the same, bleating plead as he had so long ago. "Please..."

The handle to the door turns, slowly, languidly. They've found him. He has to make a choice now. He can fight. Or he can flee. The simple choice is hard coded into his blood by the epinephrine flowing through his veins. He has only those two choices. However, he has never been too good in a fair fight without the decidedly unfair advantage of his cane to swing as a cudgel. He must have dropped it in his office. No, he remembers now. He had set it down to hang off his whiteboard, scrawling his futile diagnostic notes.

The door knob turns fully, the lock disengaging with a deafening click, and he makes his choice. He has to run, has to flee, has to get away, but he has only one option. Down. He throws his body over the edge of the balcony, shimmying over the stone and feeling the cool, coarse kiss of concrete on his stomach as he dangles his legs over the dark abyss below.

He has just a split second to wonder how high up the balcony is from the ground as his bad leg flails beneath him, his toe pawing for solid ground. In all those time he stood out there with Wilson, he had never contemplated how steep the drop, how solid the concrete below. He has just a millisecond of flash behind his eyes, the image flickering over his brainpan of himself lying with a broken back in the middle of the street. The myriad of lightning flashes of him dying down below surged into his mind, flaring to life and bleeding away as they through the door open.

His bad leg has never been spry enough for as dramatic of a maneuver as this. In fact, even the simple act of clambering over the short wall from his balcony to Wilson's has never been an elegant, smooth, or easy motion. When his toes slip on the ledge below and his fingers loosen in surprise at the motion above, his leg twitches and gives beneath him. There is a terrible, frozen moment of lurching into the darkness when he can see all these images exploding before his eyes and burning into his brain.

He twists in the air, like a cat, clawing for purchase around him and finding nothing. There is only void about him, the cold, crushing press of the shadows upon his chest and the low hum of the assorted vocalizations from above. There is nothing. _He _is that nothing, tumbling through the darkness and night. Even those greedy, terrible, vile and loathsome creatures that were once his patients cannot see him drifting out and away from the building as he slips into the void. They howl in rage and hunger, but they cannot see him floating away from them like a leaf on the wind.

And, then, the speed of the world jolts back to normal, and he comes crashing down to earth.

He unceremoniously lands hard on the harsh, unyielding concrete with an audible crack that wrenches a horrible, visceral scream from his chest. It is his betraying right leg that connects with the stone first, snapping with that horrid sound before crumpling uselessly beneath him. He cries out, unable to hold the sound in as his body folds up on the ground, clutching himself against the white-hot agony.

His eyes blur with tears as mucus pours from his nose, but he snorts and forces the wad of snot down. He is a sitting duck out here in the open, exposed, defenseless, and now so effectively and completely crippled like this. Trembling, he reaches down and jerks his pants leg up to inspect the damage, finding his ankle twisted and bent at an unnatural ankle, swelling even as he watches it in the pale moonlight. He grips himself tightly, pushing the pain down.

He arranges his legs beneath him, shrieking as shards of bone rasp against one another in his ruined ankle. He cringes and bites back the sound as a roar from one of those damned ghouls pierces the night. He curses himself. His whimpers and cries of agonies have only served to announce the presence of food, of an easy target spread out like a grand buffet in the barren, emptied hospital parking lot. He swallows the pain and the sounds that go with it as he has so many times before. He can do this. After all these years, he knows he can. He can force his legs into motion to run, seek shelter and cover, maybe even find other people - _real _people and not these moving corpses - somewhere out there in the vast nothingness of the night and the silent, dead city.

His first attempt to stand is nothing short of failure, as are his second and third attempts. Each time, his ankle twists out beneath him, and he crumples to the ground, gritting his teeth to hold back the shouts, bellows, and audible curses that threat to spill out. He has to be quiet, be invisible. But, judging from the steadily advancing shuffle of feet in the darkness, any cover he might have had has been blow away by his completely ungraceful landing.

His muscles quiver and burn beneath him, but he balls his fists and swears mentally at himself, _"Get your ass in gear, Greg. Move. Move. Move."_

He pushes himself up on his hands and decides against any further attempts at walking. His ankle is too ruined by the fall and the subsequent failures at standing. He crawls, caring not about how foolish he looks, or how the rough asphalt scrapes his leg. He has crawled before, when his leg hurts too much to allow for walking, dragging himself along the floor of his apartment to the blissful drug box on the top shelf amid all the books. He drinks in the thought of sweet, sweet morphine wrapping her chemical arms about his body and lulling him in a liquid lullaby.

_"You can have all the morphine you want if you get your ass in gear now!"_

He forces himself to move, making it a bit of the way through the parking lot of his own accord. There is a humvee on the other side of the lot, marking the edge of the quarantine zone cleared by the military. There may not be keys in it, but there are radios. He can call for help. And guns. He can defend himself. And, in the worst case scenario, a body that can handle a war. The humvee can take the physical abuse of fists and clawing fingers without a problem. He can hunker down in there and wait for the calvary to come for him.

He is close he can almost taste it when the hand curls about his dragging ankle and jerks him backwards.

"SHIT!"

He screams now in surprise and fright, regardless of the attention it might rouse. His ankle shrieks in protest from the sharp grip upon it. He rolls to his back, kicking and lashing out with his left leg. Something has him. _Someone _has him. He howls at the agony but jerks and writhes anyway. The hand falls away, loosing its grip, and he freezes, balling up on himself and drawing up his hands instinctively to protect his face and head, cowering there. A hiss meets his ears, low and threatening. He looks up from the ground, and spies a familiar set of vacant, chocolate brown eyes gazing down at him.

"Wilson..." he whispers. "Don't do this."

He knows it is not Wilson, even before the once man reaches down for him, clawing and prying, snapping with his jaws. He twists and wriggles, striking out with his own fists, punching and striking, but Wilson is too fast. Wilson shrugs off the blows as though they are nothing and keeps coming back for more.

He kicks once more and breaks Wilson's hold just enough to scuttle away. The concrete is unforgiving on his fingers, tearing apart the knuckles and tips as he scrambles away. He crosses a strange, blank line in the concrete. He does not remember it being there before, and, strangely, despite the absolute horror, it worries him, even as Wilson bears down upon him again, pouncing him from behind. Wilson's teeth flash in the moonlight, gleaming ivory white as they seek an offering of human flesh. Wilson grabs him by the wrists and holds them tightly at bay. Wilson leans in and the oncologist's breath stinks of blood and rot.

"Wilson, please," he begs. "I can fix this. I can. You know I can!" The words spill from his lips in frantic pleas. "I can cure you. Please.... please don't do this.... please .... please let me help you."

He has _never _begged Wilson before in all earnest in his entire life. Not like this. Not ever. But, now, he means it, with all his heart.

"Please don't...."

He is only mildly aware of the light advancing in his periphery and the din of noises. All he is truly aware of is the horrid face leaning in, those awful scents on Wilson's tongue as the doctor draws close enough to take a bite. He shuts his eyes. He does not need to watch as Wilson does this. Something explodes to the side, and Wilson jerks over him for but a moment before his weight comes crushing down. He flinches and screams for dear life beneath the crushing weight.

A voice calls to him in the darkness, a familiar and shushing voice. "Shhh..... shh.... you're safe now, you're safe."

He opens his eyes to see the wide gaping, oozing hole in Wilson's head and shuts them tight once more. The limp body is pushed from him, and he curls up on his side, his raw nerves flaring and firing away. The tears stream freely from his cheeks as he sobs convulsively.

"Wilson...." he whimpers in a broken whisper.

He could have cured him. He could have fixed this. He could have cured them all, if he only had the time. But, now, not anymore. Wilson's dead. Worse than dead. This time, there is _no _coming back.

"Shit. It's House," the voice announces to someone else, some stranger, as hands paw over him. "Check him for bites."

As soon as the alien hands touch his flesh, all he can think about, all he can feel is Wilson's hands on him, clawing and tearing, looking for fresh meat. He screams loud and hoarsely, despite the shushing voices and restraining arms that wrap about him. He screams even as the stranger rocks him, murmuring reassurances in his ear that he barely hears. Hands rub his arms, but the touch _burns_. He pulls feebly against their hold, his panicked brain struggling for air, for freedom. He's crying now, like a child, sniffling against the warm bulk of this stranger and burying his head into the cottony shirt.

"Shh.... shh.... House..... it's okay, but you've got to be quiet," the familiar voice drones on, crooning in his ears.

"Aw, hell," a second voice growls. "He's going to bring them all down on us."

"House.... shh.... it's okay. You're going to be alright."

Saltwater streams down his cheeks, trickling down to his lips and tongue. His mind scrambles, reaching out and pulling for the coherent, logical thought he has so embraced, but he is too far gone in his panic, too lost in the sea of epinephrine. His thoughts tumble over themselves. He gulps at the air, but it is never enough. He is drowning in his tears, in his absolute horror. Hands card tenderly through his greying hair, but even that touch is sickening.

"Oh, would you shut him up already?"

Something pierces his arm. An injection. Within seconds, his body goes loose and limp in the stranger's arms. Everything takes on a warm, wonderful, disjointed blur. The world grows distant, and, for a moment he can breath as the cocktail's tendrils tickle at his brain and threaten to pull him under cmpletely. Ativan, he knows. Or one of its chemical cousins.

The hands hold him close, only, this time, it's alright. "Shh.... shh.... it's just me. Just Foreman. I've got you now. You're safe."

And, somehow, as he drifts off, he knows it's the truth.

**xxx**

**xxxxx**

**xxx**

**Author's Notes : **You don't know how hard it is to right a zombie story WITHOUT actually saying the zed word. Saying the word "reanimate" was hard enough on me. I'm a zombie nut and just finished rereading _The Zombie Survival Guide_, so the timeline of infection actually belongs to that wonderful emergency manual. And, anyone who has read that book should know that the black line is the mark of a kill zone (*sorry, I love the idea of implying Foreman actually vaguely knowing what to do in a zombie outbreak and House being the clueless one for once).

Well, hope you enjoyed one of my other small, drabbly breaks from the big major stories.

Anyone brave enough to take on a post-story featuring House and Foreman surviving in a zombie apocalypse? Please? Pretty please? With whip cream, and a cherry, and Vicodin on top?


End file.
